Catherine Bulka

lol early in our relationship, my then boyfriend now husband made me tots with a “trio of dips” that he was very proud of. I think it was ketchup, bbq sauce, and honey mustard.

Just found a frozen lizard in my car and screamed…at that very moment, a woman walking by appeared and said “oh!! You startled me!”

Cold Florida problems

not the folks on my environmental health listserv emailing around a "pre-print" on ResearchGate by Dr. Andrew Wakefield himself and calling him a 'very reputable researcher'

i gotta get off this thing

Being a parent is so weird because I have to know things like when my child says she wants “toast bread but wet,” she means she wants toast with butter

It was $1150 for all 3 😭😭😭 I need a multi kid discount

Lol 😂

My husband says dental insurance is “a scam”

Guess how much it was to for all 3 uninsured kids to get cleanings? 🙃

Had to make a new account/download a new app to access my child’s report card. Why not just send it home on a piece of paper and end this madness 🤦🏻‍♀️

So my R script failed because I couldn't have envisioned all of these possibilities! I was able to rewrite it to handle most, then just manually graded the rest....but who knows what next year's batch will bring?

I gave them a checklist and asked them to add underscores to column names, remove invalid values, make sure medication/condition names were in title case, etc. I got back all kinds of weird stuff...empty columns, data in multiple tabs, underscores in patient names, table headers I didn't ask for...

i had this idea to ask students in the intro class to clean a 'messy' dataset. it's tiny (15 rows x 10 columns) and i thought no big deal, i'll just write some R code to read in their files and grade them. lol dumbest idea i've ever had 🤦‍♀️

Oh I couldn’t make it past the first episode 😂

I only realized once I became faculty that it’s soooo f*ing easy to be a bad professor, it’s really f*cking hard to be a good one, and we’re really only incentivized to be somewhere in between.

by the time i've woken up my 3 kids, gotten them fed, dressed, groomed, out the door, off to school, and finally arrive at my office to work...WHEW I HAVE LIVED 9 LIVES 😩

Yes!! There’s hardly any math. We mainly just focus on concepts. If they read the textbook, go to class, and review the material, they’ll be fine!

I’ve been revamping the Intro to Epi class. It previously had a reputation as being “an easy A”…now it’s probably more of an easy B. Students are starting to complain. But I don’t want to cave because one of my core beliefs is that doing good epidemiology actually *is* hard 🤷🏻‍♀️

i have a super flexible job, high health literacy, and $$ to throw at problems and i still find navigating the u.s. healthcare system hard as f***. how are those without my advantages handling it???

reporter.nih.gov/search/sFw15...

he seems very focused on genetics...which is basically the opposite of the environment 🤦‍♀️

dude isn't even a full professor at Duke.

he also has exactly 3 papers related to environmental health, 0 of which he's the first or senior author on. absolutely un-fucking-qualified to direct NIEHS

Omg 🥰🥰🥰 what a good boy

Is anyone doing research on how the rise of chatbots contributes to the loneliness epidemic??

i'm listening to a university-sponsored webinar on 'Rethinking Assessment in the Age of AI' wondering wtf we are doing to these kids 😭

hmm or like 4 dog beds next to each other...more comfortable...

I recently moved into a new office. It had a little alcove with filing cabinets that I didn't need, so they were removed. Now there's a cute little area that's partially hidden by my desk, but still easy to crawl into...I'm very tempted to put a mattress and some pillows down there 🙃 Thoughts?

Not me, a grown 37 yo, screaming at my tv “team Conrad, you idiot!!!!”

I volunteered to mentor through a program at my high school...and now this class of '06 grad is getting a little nervous. What on earth do I talk about with a 16 yo?

Hmmm. Sounds fun but might also drive me insane?

Sometimes my husband does this thing…

All 3 of my kids will be making noise in some way—crying, yelling, singing, whatever. And he’ll turn UP the volume on the tv/radio to drown them out.

It makes me feel like I’m literally short circuiting.

Daycare: hey your kid has a fever, can you come get her?
Me: ok be there in 20 mins

Get kiddo home, take temperature…98.4 degrees. Cool cool cool.

In case anyone finds this helpful, I live in FL and was able to get my Covid shot at CVS today with no issues. The website made me state whether or not I a medical condition that put me at high risk so I checked yes (physical inactivity was listed and that sounds about right!). I wasn’t asked again.

Just realized my kid had some game on the iPad that was charging us $10/week…for…a while 🤦🏻‍♀️